


Truth and Illusion

by LobaEclipse



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, F/M, Gen, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-31
Updated: 2016-01-05
Packaged: 2018-04-29 05:51:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5117795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LobaEclipse/pseuds/LobaEclipse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the purposes of this AU, we are operating under the assumption that everything canon happens pretty much the same, except that the genre is urban fantasy rather than vaguely sci-fi.  </p><p>A collections of oneshots, gen with Olicity leanings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Early Season One**

 

The book took her nearly two days to crack. It was small and unobtrusive, but she could feel the power of it when she held it in her hand, layer upon layer of whispers and blood packed between its covers.

She was almost disappointed when she called in a favor with the Applied Sciences development team and got a good look at the seemingly blank pages. Just a list. Not a grimoire of forbidden spells, not a map of dark laylines, not a transcription of untranslated runes. Only page after page of ordinary human names.

She took her coffeebreak then and there, and sulked her way through the whole fifteen minutes of awful breakroom coffee and annoyingly upbeat music from the radio that someone had spelled to only pick up some bland pop station out of Mississippi. (Truthfully, only about four minutes of annoying music passed before she hexed the machine into silence, but it was the principle of the matter.) After her allotted time, she considered herself ready to take on the book's next challenge.

Sure, lists in and of themselves weren't terribly interesting. But lists were composed of data, fuel for the curious mind. This was a very specific list of very specific people. Googling was faster than scrying, and when Felicity picked a random page and typed in some names, that now-familiar thrill of excitement and fear returned. Her first impression had been right; the book was full of dark power. The men and women in its pages were strong, magical and mundane alike. And they were bad, the worst kind of bad – seedy, underhanded, greedy people who used every means necessary to get what they wanted and escape the consequences.

But if you knew the name of a thing, you had a handle on it. Everyone got the shivers thinking about how crossroads demons wanted their contracts penned in blood, but the signature itself was just as important. In Felicity's particular brand of magic, and her personal philosophy on life, truth was knowledge and knowledge was the greatest form of power. In the right hands, the book of dark power could be turned on itself and pulled into the light. By the looks of what had happened to some of the people on that list, someone already had.


	2. Chapter 2

**Mid-Late Season One**

 

When she first began trying to puzzle out Oliver Queen, she hadn't given much thought to his magic.

It was well-known that he had some level of magical power, but he was not a serious practitioner, as far as anyone could tell. Why should he be? His money and his social standing were just as useful, if not moreso in the circles he inhabited. Probably all he knew was a few cantrips for parlor tricks and some some petty, subtle means to get his way when all else failed. At least, that was all the mainstream media could offer on the subject. Felicity dutifully filed the few tidbits of information away and then moved on.

Even after she found him half dead in her back seat and so many of those pesky variables slotted into place, she still didn't think about it.

Until she stepped through the wards.

The door opened for her when she laid her hand on the keypad. It might have been because she begged, or it might have been because his blood was on her fingertips, or it might have been some combination of the two. Either way, it silently unlocked and swung inwards. She put one foot over the threshold and her whisper of thanks died in her throat. Protective magic washed over her like an ocean wave. For half a second that felt so, so much longer she stood frozen as it crashed upon her, broke against her own magic, and washed around and over and through her before receding. It lapped against the edges of her awareness, gentle and unassuming, as though it hadn't been a riptide only a moment before. She allowed herself one deep, steadying breath before shoving the incident out of her mind. There were bigger things to worry about.

It was only later that she allowed herself to wonder. Where had he learned that, and how? The wards were unlike any she had ever seen. No carefully controlled units of power set out in a prescribed pattern. This was more like a force of nature half-tamed. It was not the sort of magic she would expect from a shallow billionaire, but it was oddly fitting for a deadly vigilante.

Felicity was having less and less difficulty reconciling the two personas – or, rather, the two facets of the same persona – in her mind, though every now and then he would throw her for a loop, just when she thought she had him all worked out.

He was like a man with a volatile temper who had learned incredible self-restraint. (She later learned that the comparison was not inaccurate. He could make rooms tremble with his anger. He shorted out three comm units before she got the right balance of programming and runes to protect them.) Reckless and calculating, stoic and passionate, guileless and cunning, Oliver Queen remained a fascinating enigma. His magic was an extension of his self, worked deep into his very bones. It was an indelible part of everything he did, once she was aware of it. She couldn't un-see it; the pattern leapt out at her the way a picture would resolve itself out of a mass of dots in an optical illusion puzzle. She sometimes wondered at the obliviousness of the other people around him, how they seemed unaware of something so obvious.

Then one day she was wondering more than usual or perhaps she was wondering out loud without meaning to (or perhaps he could read her like she could read him, but that was another thought for another time) and he gave her one of those sly, almost-amused looks. It was a look that said she was in on a joke that nobody else had caught on to and he was pleased that she had figured it out. His magic was the same as his hood, weapon and camouflage rolled into one, like a viper with mottled scales coiled amongst the desert rocks. The unwary who stumbled upon him might be killed or might be ignored, but only the ones who knew how to look could see him as he really was.


	3. Chapter 3

**Mid Season Three**

 

_Slap. Slap. Slap._

She dealt the cards rapidfire on the workbench, barely glancing at them before gathering them up, shuffling, and dealing once more.

_Slap. Slap. Slap._

Change. Journey. Death.

Love. Conflict. Death.

Strength. Betrayal. Death.

She had been using dice, rattling them in a dusty tumbler she'd found upstairs and casting them on the glass tabletop. The patterns of numbers spelled out the future for her to read the same way patterns of animal guts had done for her distant forebearers. Her more recent forebearers were from Las Vegas, a city built on subterfuge and statistics, and the dice spoke to her more freely than freshly butchered chickens. That was before her hands began to shake so badly that she couldn't catch them before they skittered to the edge and fell. They were still scattered around the floor along with the shards of the tumbler.

_Slap. Slap. Slap._

So she changed to a deck of cards with motorcycles on the backs from the gas station on the corner. They were cheap and flimsy. The edges were already beginning to fray under her abuse. She poured her magic through the cards and into the arrow lying across from her on the workbench, a placeholder for the person who was so far away, then back through the cards and into herself once more, a closed circuit.

_Slap. Slap. Slap._

Seven of Hearts. King of Diamonds. Ace of Spades.

Four of Clubs. Four of Hearts. Ace of Spades.

Three of Diamonds. Nine of Spades. Ace of Spades.

John slowly and carefully folded his hands over hers. They fluttered helplessly for a moment like trapped birds, then went still as she bowed her head to her chest. Her magic withdrew into a tight, grim ball in her ribcage next to her grief. It left the cards empty and dull. He gathered them up and stacked them neatly. The ace of spades was lost somewhere in the middle, but she knew that if she reached for the deck it would claw its way out and into her hand.

She didn't reach for it. She'd seen the future. There was only death.


End file.
